Alex Gomes >> Blog

MSN just came out with a killer application, actually no, but this might what finally kills Google. For few hours on March 6, 2006, MSN allowed advertisers and beta testers to signup to there new services, MSN Adcenter. This is MSN’s answer to Google Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture.

MSN Adcenter lets publishers advertise there website in MSN Network (MSN, MSN Search, Hotmail etc). In the future, advertisers would also be able to advertise in third party websites. Well I tried Adcenter on March 6, 2006. It’s was little bit fun and already lot different than what Google and Yahoo offers. Very easy to use, but there are lot of bugs to be fixed before it goes fully public.

First the account basics:

Campaigns:

Allows you set up ads and campaigns
A very good feature is country/city targeting. But it lacks some popular cities.

The ad setup is four step process; 1) settings, 2) ads, 3) keywords, 4) pricing. There are some targeting features not available in Google and Yahoo but present in MSN. Adcenter has targeting for days and time of the ad impression. You can also setup how you spend your money. You can spread your budget over the month or deplete according to the traffic. Overall Adcenter allows you micro target your ads.

Accounts & Billings:

You add credit cards and account details

Research:

This is interesting as it provides wealth of information not available anywhere on the internet.

You can pull up information about keywords in two ways:

You can type in the URL of the website and it will list the keywords or similar keywords. It doesn’t work very well as of this moment. Lot of work needs to be done

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You can also type in the keywords directly.

The keywords bring wealth of information. It tells you the frequency in the last months.
Also some other interesting facts

Traffic Trends: The frequency of keywords over time
Age and Gender: This is golden information not available anywhere else, and pretty accurate, except for the male/female ratio.
Geography: Most popular originating cities of the visitors.
Wealth Index: Classifies if the demographic is rich/poor/etc.
Lifestyle: Life style of the users.

Reports:

I haven’t spent any actual money yet, so haven’t tested out this part yet.

There are also lots of bugs that MSN needs to fix.

Bugs:

• Does not work with Mozilla FireFox
• Some US cities not available. I.e. Cary, NC
• “Target an ad to a specific day of the week”- empty time slots
• “Target an ad to a specific time of the day”- empty time slots
• Login Session expires too soon. Not enough time to do any testing.
• Default “Broad” match for keywords can’t be changed

Research

• “Contain Terms” for website come up empty. (This shouldn’t be that difficult to fix.)
• “Similar terms” for website does not work very well.
• “Traffic trends” data is not consistent and not reliable.
• “Geography” and “Lifestyle” data is kind of junk and useless.
• “Females” data in “Age and Gender” seems to be inflated.

Hopefully, MSN will fix the issues before Adcenter goes public.

Yahoo YPN

YPN stands for Yahoo Publisher Network. Its Yahoo’s answers to Google Adsense. With an YPN account, a web publisher can put ads on there website and earn money. As of writing, Yahoo YPN is at beta stage. YPN debuted in August 2005 and is already giving Google a challenge.

I was one of the lucky ones or big enough publisher to get a Yahoo invite earlier this year (2006). I was amazed and little bit nervous putting YPN code in my website. After all YPN is still in beta. So I tried in one of my website. YPN is very similar to Adsense in setup and targeting. I will leave out the details of ad setup in another article. But here are some things I liked and did not like. After more than one month, I have got enough statistics to write a review. In general Yahoo YPN pays you more than Adsense. But the click through rate is worse than Adsense. YPN still has some bugs in targeting the right ads. But “Targeting Ads” function is really great for sites that have lot of flash content. “Targeting Ads” can target your site to defined category. The 45 day wait for pay check reduces your cash flow. But the pay check is bigger than Adsense. Here are more things I found:

Pros:
Ease of setup. Pretty straight forward.
Multiple ad units.
I really liked the Ad targeting feature, which is not available in Adsense.
Better CPC compare to Adsense.
You get higher priced advertiser.

Cons:
Content Setup is little difficult, I still haven’t dwelt too much into it yet.
Can’t delete channels.
Stat updates lags more than 24 hours at times.
You have to wait 45 days to get a paycheck.
Contextual ad targeting has lot of bugs.
The descriptions in the ads are too long and get cropped at the end.
Duplicate ads in Ad Units.
Reporting only on Ad Units as opposed to Ad Pages (CTR thus is under reported).

Remember Yahoo YPN is still in the beta stage. The folks at Yahoo are working hard to improve YPN and reducing the bugs. Its only the beginning and they are going to get better in the future.

Here is a Server Side Include tutorial I wrote few years back.

SSI Tutorial